Johannesburg

The journey to Malawi was more exciting than expected. During a brief layover in Atlanta, I glanced at my itinerary and realized that it included an overnight 16 hour layover in Johannesburg, once again confirming my realization that it was a dumb idea to watch an extremely graphic movie about gang violence in Johannesburg the night before departure. (I still recommend "Tsotsi"!! Just time it differently!!) Internet sites for hotels near the Jo'berg airport had user comments like "There was an armed robbery on the fourth floor while I was there", so I reluctantly booked a super-expensive room at the only place my travel agent was familiar with. While our flight from Atlanta to Dakar was delayed, I met a young American woman with blond hair tied back in 2 french braids wearing dark-rimmed glasses, beat up jeans, flip flops, a tank top showing off her Celtic knot tattoo, and a huge REI backpack. Friendly, talkative, and completely down-to-earth, she's a volunteer for DAPP - is living in Zambia for 6 months doing environmental work in the bush. Our flight delay was going to cause Maureen (pictured at left) to miss her connection to Zambia, and she planned to spend the night in the airport, which she'd done before. A friend from her volunteer program was posted in Johannesburg, and in a period of 6 months this guy was mugged 5 times at either gunpoint or machete-point, and once was set on fire. "He's the kind of guy who attracts it though," she said - a white guy with dreds, lots of tattoos and piercings." Still it didn't sound positive!

An older South African woman listening to our conversation said that the airport was probably safer than any hotel in Johannesburg. "We have a lot of problems," she said gravely. So I decided to stay with Maureen and cancelled my hotel reservation. Then we hopped on the plane and landed in Johannesburg 18 hours later (with refueling in Dakar). When we arrived, we found that South African Air would not check us in a day early for our flights out the next morning, so we could not get back into the secure part of the airport that we exited when we went through customs. So we had to find a place to stay- but since out 2-hour flight delay had caused Maureen and about 15 - 20 other passengers to miss their connections, Delta made arrangements for all of us to stay in a hotel. And the Delta people very kindly let me stay with Maureen even though the delay had not changed my itinerary!! It took about an hour for Delta to arrange transportation for us, and meanwhile Maureen and I hung out with this American guy who runs a training center in Botswana for law enforcement officers - mainly managers/higher-up administrators like police superintendents - for a very large region in Africa. They host several multinational trainings per year. A black guy from Georgia, he started out as a police officer and worked his way up; I was very impressed at how he built this career for himself. He struck me as a very highly evolved person. "As a cop you come to terms with death," he said. "You have to: you see it all the time." But when I pressed he admitted that probably not all cops came to terms with it. He certainly seemed a lot more at peace with it than I was, obsessing about possible crimes that I felt would inevitably strike us that night!

Yet we made it safely to our hotel, which was actually quite nice (though minimally secured), and the three of us ate together and shared travel tales. Stan looked around 50 (?) and had a great memory for facts and historical stuff - he told us a little about African-American history - how slaves from the same place were always separated because the owners didn't want the slaves to be able to communicate - and he told us that it was white women who first educated slaves (secretly, against their husbands' will). He said always remembers that and feels grateful to those courageous women. He also mentioned that we should be careful as women in this region of Africa: he heard of a woman was raped by a taxi driver in Johannesburg, and the police did not prosecute since she was wearing a short skirt. Stan was quite a person, a very highly developed person. Oh and he'd read "The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series (among my favorite books) and even met the author (another really cool person!! A professor of medical law in Cambridge who lived 20 years in Botswana and has written over 200 books). Apparently "The #1 Ladies Detective Agency" has been made into a movie (how did I miss this?), which would have been a much more appropriate movie to watch before departing Seattle.

(here's a photo of us 3; haven't figured out how to add labels to photos yet on this thing!)

We all went to bed, slept great, and I woke up super early due to jet lag. I meditated, then watched people on the street. Johannesburg is highly developed - the streets are paved and well-maintained, neatly lined with traffic lights and palm trees, and the sidewalk was a curved pattern of multicolored bricks. From 5:30-6:30 a.m. there were a fair number of pedestrians - all wearing winter hats and humble clothes. There was plenty of car traffic - and at this hour almost all the pedestrians were black though I saw plenty of white people in cars. The only white pedestrian I saw that early looked like an old hippie, a guy around 50 with longish hair, wearing beat up clothes and sneakers, who greeted the black guy outside our hotel in some tribal language (not Afrikaans or English). As the morning progressed though, better-off walkers appeared: from 6:30-7:30 some walkers wore ipods, a few non-hippie whites appeared, and a black woman in a perfectly-fitted business suit walked while talking on her cell phone and holding a small designer handbag. Since cell phones, ipods, and handbags are all attractive targets for theft, it appeared safe at this hour, from the comfort these folks exuded. Across the street was a pancake house with a huge fake windmill, and a woman showed up for work wearing this stylized black and white maid's outfit (including cap) that looked like it was the formal attire for Dutch maids about 150 years ago. She had added some knee-high pink and red argyle socks to jazz it up. When we stepped out into the cool, foggy morning, it smelled like we were in Belgium - some kind of Belgian bread/pastry/waffle smell that reminded me of Europe but had never experienced in Africa. What an intriguing city!!

That's the news from Jo'berg. I could have studied the city endlessly, but instead flew comfortably and effortlessly to Malawi, and although I have seen and felt many different things in this gentle and colorful country already, I'll have to wait till my next time on internet to send them to you.